Grasping for the Moon
by Nubushi
Summary: When a crash of thunder rings out, interrupting Clair and Silver in battle, Clair is momentarily distracted. Silver would never have guessed that Clair had a fear of thunderstorms, but fortunately, Silver is there to . . . ? Seize every opportunity to press the attack, of course. Mostly one-sided Silver/Clair (Silverdragonshipping). One-shot.


Silver pushed sweat-damp bangs from his face, eyes locked on his opponent as he considered his next move. Despite the years that had gone by since he had won his Rising Badge from Clair, when fighting all-out she was like a force of nature as unrelenting as the pounding rain he had surfed through to come to the Dragon's Den today, or like a dragon herself, the serpentine beasts of mythology that called down rain and lightning at will.

When they had first started having battles together regularly, he had always thought he would be able to keep track of how many battles he won or lost, but in the end he had only kept track for a dozen or so. It was hard to say who won more, but for him, it always depended on timing—whether he was able to guess what pokemon the dragon user would send out next to take advantage of her dragons' weakness to ice, or to take down her gyarados with a well-placed bolt of electricity.

Hoping for just that sort of luck, he pulled a pokeball from his belt to release his magneton—and then mentally cursed when just after its steel spheres materialized, he saw Clair's lips curve upward in that smug smile she always wore when things went her way, and the atoms from the pokemon she released coalesced into the massive orange form of her charizard.

The fire-lizard lunged forward, ripping into Silver's magneton with fire in its breath and a thousand pounds of force in its jaws.

There was another blinding flash as in its last moments before losing consciousness his magneton let out an electric discharge that made the drake regret taking it into its maw. Then Clair recalled the charizard—injured and annoyed, but not yet unconscious—to send out a fresh pokemon.

Which left Silver with his last pokemon, his sneasel, standing against a dragonite it was no match for.

It looked perfectly at ease anyways, smirking up at the larger pokemon with a grin of vicious intent.

"Sneasel, use Ice Claw!"

"Take it out with a thunderbolt!"

It was then that something happened that Silver would never have expected.

A deafening crash of thunder rang through the cave, not from Clair's dragonite, but from outside. What surprised him, though, was the way Clair visibly startled, her shoulders jerking up as she looked wide-eyed, over her shoulder towards the entrance of the cave.

Her dragonite, too, froze momentarily in confusion, sensing the hesitation of its trainer.

It wasn't Silver's fault that his sneasel took advantage of the moment, darting out to rake into the dragonite's exposed flank with its lethal claws glowing blue with bitter cold. His sneasel was just acting like a well-oiled battle machine, doing exactly what it had been trained to do, what had been drilled into it through countless long hours of grueling training.

Never hesitate. Never pity an opponent's weakness. Always take every opportunity to seize the advantage.

So it _was_ his fault, really.

It wasn't enough.

Clair's lapse was only momentary—though a part of him, despite the raging battle, noticed the way that her shoulders, which had raised during her startle reflex, remained tense, failing to relax back down into their usual position. A thunderbolt—her dragonite's thunderbolt, this time, slammed his sneasel into the cave floor, where it lay still and unmoving until Silver recalled it to its pokeball.

But way more interesting things had transpired than the battle he just lost.

"You train lightning-breathing dragons, and you're afraid of thunderstorms?" He smirked.

"Shut up!" she snapped. With Clair, flashing eyes were no exaggeration; he could almost see the sparks flying as she tossed her head like a wild rapidash.

"So it's true then," he added, his interest deepening. He hadn't been quite sure at first—was it just a startle reflex, or was it fear fear?—but he was now.

"That's rich coming from the one who had your team just ground to powder by those dragons." There was color rising to her face—but far from girlish embarrassment, this was the heat of anger.

Silver understood exactly what she was feeling. She was mad, but not mad at him—not really. She hated having a weakness exposed, and she was putting on a fire show trying to hide it. Deep down, she felt ashamed.

Ignoring her taunt, "Do you want me to hold you?" he pressed on, half-mocking, half-amused.

"In your dreams, loser," she said, crossing her arms and rolling her eyes in a gesture that was vintage Clair. The stiffness in her shoulders failed to go away, though.

"Careful what you say—my gengar could make that happen."

"By giving you nightmares? Now I'm not sure if you're insulting me or yourself."

That one had really backfired on him. What had he been meaning to suggest? He would use his gengar to give him dreams of holding Clair? Way to make himself really seem like a loser.

"Yeah, holding you would be a nightmare." At least there was something salvageable he could use to make the idea into a retort, but he was embarrassed by the turn of the conversation and turned to leave. "Anyways, guess the loser will get going now," he said sarcastically. He tried to push the thought of Clair's tense shoulders, which kept nagging at him, out of his mind.

"Wait," she said unexpectedly. "You don't have to . . . you could stay, you know?" A hint of a question crept into her haughty voice.

Right. The thunderstorm. As if to remind him, it gave a soft, receding rumble.

He met Clair's eyes briefly, startled, and then looked away, made somehow painfully self-conscious by the unexpected note of vulnerability. It set him so off-balance, in fact, that the only thing that came to mind the next time he opened his mouth was what he was actually thinking.

"I didn't expect someone like you would be afraid of storms," he said. He glanced at Clair, warily gauging her reaction. She stood with arms rigidly crossed, standing perfectly still.

"I wasn't scared, just startled," she snapped, but it was just an automatic defense, lacking the fire Clair had when she was truly enraged. Her posture hadn't changed, but he could tell she wasn't really mad.

"Well, you're not the sort of person who startles easily, so it must have been something pretty bad that happened," he placated—and then hastened to make sure she knew he wasn't pushing her to reveal something about herself she didn't want to. After all, he hated it when other people did that to him. "I mean, you don't have to tell me why if you don't want to."

A silence followed that probably would have made most people uncomfortable—but Silver was not a sociable person and did not care much about social niceties like whether a break in the conversation made someone uncomfortable or not. Also, he was too busy musing on the possibilities of what might be inferred from Clair's asking him to stay to be bothered by it himself.

He turned partially away from her, leaning his elbows on the wooden rail of the deck. "I wonder how long it'll take to for the storm to pass." If he listened closely, he could still hear the distant sound of the rain pouring down outside.

"Who knows?" she turned to rest her hands on the rail beside him, and there was another silence while they both gazed out on the endless dark lines of waves on the underground lake. "Well," she started after a pause, "I guess since you're training here all the time, it wouldn't hurt for you to know." She cast Silver a sideways glance, sizing up his reaction the same way he had gauged hers a few moments ago. "If you want to."

He shrugged, feigning nonchalance. "I don't mind. It's up to you." He was actually desperately curious, but trying to get to know Clair was like trying to approach a wild rapidash—if you chased after her too hard, she would only run away.

"You won't tell anyone, right?"

He snorted. "You know how social I am." Starting with Lyra, he had found that he had gained a small but reliable nucleus of friends, but even with them, he basically operated under the guiding principle of not telling anyone anything unless there was a really good reason to.

This seemed to satisfy her. "Well," she started, "when I was very small, I was mad that everyone had pokemon and I didn't. Somehow I found an empty pokeball and went out into the hills, thinking I could catch a pokemon of my own with that. The weather turned, it started storming, and . . . there are all these really steep paths up and down hillsides around here. You can climb those when it's dry, but when it's wet . . ." she shrugged. Silver listened in fascination to the glimpse into the life of Clair as a child. Wild, rebellious, reckless. "Trying to get home, I slipped down one of those, of course scraping myself up horribly, and then I was down there in the bottom, and I couldn't get up the other side because it had all turned to mud. And this gully was filling up with flood water, and I couldn't get out . . . it's a stupid story, I don't know why I'm even telling you this."

At this last phrase, color rose to her cheeks again, not in anger this time.

"So what happened? How did you get out?"

She shrugged indifferently, looked away. "My parents found me, and they didn't let me out of the house again for a week." She paused for a moment. Then, "Lance was there too," she added. "With my parents. He was old enough to have pokemon at that time, he came with them to help look for me."

Mentally, Silver winced in sympathy at hearing that her older cousin had gone with her parents and was there when they found her. The cousin who was already allowed to have pokemon. Who did everything right. Whom all the adults trusted. That, of course, would only have rubbed salt into her wounds. No wonder she had a lifelong rivalry with the dragon master, trying to make herself like him in every way, but stronger.

The sound of boots echoing on stone cut off Silver's opportunity to ask one of the dozens of questions that were buzzing inside him.

"Speak of the devil," Clair said dryly, rolling her eyes again.

As the older man, with his fiery red spikes of hair and iconic cape, came into view and he took in the sight of Clair and Silver together, his expression remained almost impassive—all but for what might have been a tiny upward twitch of one eyebrow, or maybe just a trick of the torchlight.

Clair turned to face her cousin. "Lance. How's the weather out there?" she asked, indifferently.

"Pretty nice, actually," he said, just as nonchalant as she was. "Just a few minutes ago it cleared up all of a sudden."

"Here for business?"

"Clan meeting," he said, "to which you are also coming, right?" He arched an eyebrow as he questioned her.

"Right. I'll be right there soon," she said, not moving.

"All right. See you then," Lance said, and continued on his way to the inner depths of the cave.

"So I guess you've gotta get going," Silver said when the sound of Lance's footsteps had faded away.

"Yeah, I've got to get going," she replied, and this time, she stirred into motion, walking towards Silver on her way to follow Lance to the inner shrine.

In passing—it might have been her shoes, but Silver noticed she was still taller than he was—she patted his shoulder briefly. Hers, he saw, had finally relaxed again.

"Thanks, Silver," she said. She looked at him sideways as she passed him, just the faintest hint of softness in her eyes, her mouth the slightest sliver of a smile.

It was in that moment, and in the moments following, as he glimpsed the sinuous curves of her form before her cape concealed the contours of her body like clouds scudding over the moon, that the idol of the small-breasted nymph he had secretly worshiped in his younger days shattered into dust. In its place, the image of a woman whose eyes flashed fire, who clung to her pride like a banner no matter how much she was afraid deep down inside, was enthroned forever in Silver's heart.

He knew enough of the world to know that there was nothing that twenty-something women wanted with seventeen-year-old boys. The distance between them was so vast, he may as well try to reach out and grasp the moon his as try to make Clair his. But as he watched the black of her cloak disappear into the comforting darkness of the Dragon's Den, he made a vow to himself: somehow, someday, he would find a way.

* * *

Author's notes:

Constructive criticism welcome!

This story is from a prompt on The Artist's Zone, using the following prompts (challenge and prompts provided by AquilaTempestas):

There's a thunderstorm. Character A has a fear of storms but fortunately Character B is there to help them.

AND

Pokemon battle.

1600-2000 words for the two prompts; subtracting the author's notes, this comes in at 1785. (Edit: I revised taking into mind reviewers' feedback, and it's now over by about 200 words, but a lot of time has gone by since the challenge, so I am just going to let this story be the length it needs to be.)

Silver is there to "help" (w). I saw this prompt and wanted to do something turns around the cliché of the female character with a fear of thunderstorms melting into the arms of the male character who is there to comfort and reassure her, so I thought of this idea of Clair being the one with a fear of storms, and not wanting to show it even one bit.

I don't know if anybody has ever paired these two before, but I like the idea of the two of them together once Silver is a little older. Clair is immature for her age. Silver is, well, I wouldn't call him "mature," but he has the street smarts of someone who has had to fend for himself from a young age. Clair is a tsundere. Silver is tsuntsun. It seems like they would enjoy sparring with each other verbally as well as in pokemon battles. And Silver likes to hang out in the dragon's den and train, so they probably see each other a lot.

Also, I combed through both and AO3 to see if there were *any* stories pairing these two characters, and I found none, so I claim the right to give this pairing a silly pairing name. Silver/Clair, I christen thee Silverdragonshipping. I would say I hope lots of people read this and go out and write more Silver/Clair stories, but I don't think many people still write for these games nowadays. (Edit: What do you know, there was a silly shipping name, DragonDenShipping. Thanks to She Who Loves Pineapples for pointing this out.)

Finally, Ice Claw does not exist in the games, though I did a search, and apparently it does exist in the trading card game, and seems a good fit for a sneasel.


End file.
